Disease Concept of Food Addiction (eBook)

INTRODUCTION
TO ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT (1989)

I am a recovering food addict. For the last three and a half years, I have been working as a counselor for an in-patient food addiction treatment program. I work with individual patients, lead process groups, and give lectures on the disease concept of food addiction.

After doing this work for a while, I realized that many in food-related Twelve Step programs did not have access to some of the information which I was presenting in treatment. Some do not have insurance and can’t afford treatment. Others are doing well without professional help. However, I sensed that lectures in treatment sometimes helped food addicts understand and accept their disease more completely, so I have looked for ways of sharing this information with a larger audience.

I would like to begin with an important qualification: I do not consider myself to be an expert in the area of food addition, at least not in the usual ways we think of experts in our society. While I do have an M.A. in Human Services and have taught counseling in college and other settings, this was before I was in recovery myself. More specifically, it was before I understood that I am a food addict.

Thus, I am very clear that it is not my academic knowledge or my professional training which is critical to my own recovery. It is rather the fellowship of Twelve Step programs and the experience, strength and hope of other compulsive eaters and food addicts who saved, and continue to save, my life.

I present here information I learned from others. It seems true to me today, meaning that it fits my own experience as a food addict and seems to be useful to the other food addicts with whom I talk. I am attempting to share it as closely as I can to the way I share it in person, using examples, as often as possible, from my own experience. The only authority I claim is that it is as honest an expression of my own thinking and experience as I can express at this time.

As a counselor, I always try to begin by sharing that I got my initial recovery through a Twelve Step program, and I continue to get help from Twelve Step fellowships to remain in recovery.

Before I came to recovery a little over five years ago, I was trained as a counselor – even taught counseling in college. When I work with a client now, I try to begin by saying, “I trust my recovery in my Twelve Step program much more than I trust my counseling skills. Counseling didn’t help me deal with my food problems. In fact, I was teaching a graduate course where most of the students were professionals in the field of addiction, most recovering from alcoholism or drug addiction or both, and it didn’t even occur to me that my problems with food were similar. I only learned that when I myself went to a Twelve Step program.”

Since I have been in recovery, I have gone to counselors. They have helped. Basically, they have helped me work my Twelve Step program. Even to do this, though, I have had to put my abstinence first and work the steps with my sponsor.

So now, as I am writing notes on food addiction which might be read by someone new to the disease concept, my recommendation is to go to a Twelve Step program. I suggest that you attend at least six meetings before you make up your mind; and, if you are looking for something to read, I suggest reading the first 164 pages of the book Alcoholics Anonymous and substitute the words “compulsive overeating” or “food addiction” for “alcoholism.” This is where I started.

My initial recovery from food addiction, which I then called compulsive overeating, came through a Twelve Step program. After years of struggling with my weight and coming to the realization myself that weight was just a secondary problem – my problem was with food – I found myself crying uncontrollably on the floor at a support group meeting. Another member of the group who was himself a recovering alcoholic sensed that my problem with food was much like his with alcohol. Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) had worked for him; he challenged me to attend a food-related support group. I agreed to go to six meetings.

It took me six months and 1500 miles to make good on my agreement; but finally, I did go to a Twelve Step food-related support group meeting. Almost immediately, I had the sense that I was home. I was in a room full of others who had been driven by food and attempts to control it – they had lied about food, stolen food, tried diet after diet, starved themselves, tried purging and all the latest fads, eaten out of the garbage, endangered their lives over food, thought of ending their lives because they felt so crazy and depressed, then rationalized it wasn’t too bad and they should just try again.

I was hopeless that first night and much of the first few months in the program; I didn’t believe the program would work for me. But I kept hearing others in the fellowship say they had been there, too. I believed them. It seemed clear that many were not there any longer. So I kept coming back, reading the “Big Book” (Alcoholics Anonymous), and asking for help.

It wasn’t easy. The first day I committed my food to a sponsor, it took me over eight hours just to deal with my food – making a plan, reading all the labels when buying my food, preparing it in a way I could weigh and measure, eating and cleaning up, and dealing with my racing mind and feelings.

In the first thirty days, I had only about five days of really clean abstinence, and none of them back-to-back; but in working day to day with my sponsor, I started learning to be more honest about my food and my feelings – and, at my sponsor’s suggestion, I got down on my knees and prayed.

By the second or third month, I was regularly abstinent for a week at a time, once even for 10 days, and I started to do work on the Twelve Steps, i.e., reading and writing assignments from my sponsor. I seemed incredibly inept, but I committed 30 to 60 minutes of step work a day when I committed my food, put in the time, followed instructions as best I could, and was as honest as possible when I had problems, just as I was learning to be honest with my food.

I kept being surprised at how difficult this new form of honesty was for me. I had always thought of myself as “honest to a fault.” It turned out there was a fault. I really didn’t want to admit when I had not been abstinent. I kept thinking that it was “humiliating.” It took me several months to realize that my sponsor never did anything that was even slightly humiliating. Just the opposite. When I told the truth, she just said, “Good,” then asked me for my food commitment and gave me some step work to do for the day.

The problem was that I was seeing my sponsor in an authority role and expecting to be humiliated or hurt. I started to realize that I had been doing this all my life, originally probably a reaction to my parents. Then I generalized to everyone in the world.

One afternoon when I was sitting at the kitchen table doing an assignment in the Big Book, I realized that as a child I had had a food allergy which gave me diarrhea with almost anything I ate. As I was contemplating what it might have been like as a child, I noticed that I was very angry. I was imagining myself as a little infant who was in a lot of pain, not able to keep food down, even getting bleeding hemorrhoids from weeks and months of runny bowels. I noticed that I was thinking this was “unfair,” and that I was “angry at life for putting a little baby through such pain.”

Angry at “life?” Who was “life?” I realized that I was angry, really burning angry, at God.

Then, almost as fast as I realized this, I also noticed that this was anger that I had been holding on to since I was a child and that the anger had been – and still was – an obstacle in the way of my relating to God. I had the thought that God had always been there, but my holding this deep resentment kept me from being in open and direct communication. I dropped to my knees, asking God to remove this anger from me. In that moment, I felt a new peace; and with this, a new sense of hope and possibility. Slowly over the next few months, I began to be more open to Authority with a capital “A.”

This was the story of most of my first year. I kept putting my abstinence first and working through the Twelve Steps with my sponsor’s guidance. It was hard, but I kept seeing a little progress. I started putting more days of back-to-back abstinence together, finally a month at a time. I worked through a detailed inventory of my anger and fear, shared them with my sponsor, and then started to make amends. Almost every day – either while doing my step work or at a meeting or even out in the world – I would have some small insight. I began to think of these insights as spiritual. Most of these insights were not as completely ground-shifting as discovering my deep, long-held anger at God, but each made a difference. Slowly, I actually began to trust my own spiritual experience, at least a little.

I often said to myself that year that I was lucky not to have to work full time. Actually, I had been fired from a job a couple of years before as the disease got worse, and it’s not clear that I would have been able to work full time. But I did have some money saved up – and my wife let me borrow on her savings, so I was able not just to put my abstinence and recovery first, but also to devote substantial amounts of time to step work, meetings, and working with newcomers. I’m grateful that I was able to do this. I’m grateful that I was willing.